Right from the beginning, cryptocurrency had one big challenge in the form of scalability. The crypto community unanimously agreed to the fact that blockchain needs to be more efficient. Thus, developers started to put in efforts to come up with new solutions addressing this issue.
Sharding emerged as one of the effective methods that made the ledger-based networks scalable to a great extent. While the concept has been around for some time, not many people know it. So, let’s delve deeper into sharding and see what it offers.
Sharding: A Brief Explanation
In blockchain, sharding means fragmenting or breaking down a large network into smaller portions. In this way, the data gets transferred in small chunks rather than huge volumes. As a result, the response time of the network gets faster and transactions take less time. It addresses the latency issues and streamlines the flow of information. This particular database partitioning technique has helped blockchain companies achieve better results.
Factors of Sharding One Must Understand
Sharding works in a certain manner and it has its share of challenges as well. Hence, it’s better to go through them one by one.
Horizontal Partitioning
Sharding follows a horizontal pattern for apportioning a large piece of a database into various parts. These small portions are called rows. The nature and characteristics of one row could be different from another. For instance, one may just save a specific address and another could just store the transaction history.
Moreover, it’s possible to categorize shards or rows depending on the type of assets they cache. To make a transaction, the user may have to use a combination of shards.
Shard Sharing and Security
While facilitating the partitioning, sharding maintains the key aspect of blockchain which is to share information on a decentralized ledger. It means that the process has to ensure easy accessibility of shards to all the members of the network. While the method manages to do that, it faces some unique security concerns as well.
In sharding, one row can take over another which typically results in the loss of data. Furthermore, a network distributed with multiple small blockchains becomes more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Making Nodes Faster
Blockchain is essentially a network of nodes. Each of them stores transaction volumes and functions independently. The efficacy and security of a decentralized network depend on the functionality of nodes. It is a must that they process all transactions with utmost efficiency.
By design, this structure ensures the safety of the information to a great extent. However, it makes the transactions quite slow and creates a backlog in a running environment. Sharding solves this issue by creating fragments of transactions.
Complexity, Tight Coupling, and Double-Spending
The smaller chunks of blockchain create some other issues as well. A little lack of attention could result in improper implementation. This paves the way for double-spending which compromises the efficacy of the method.
The complexity of implementation is another big challenge that the developers face. When it comes to splitting an existing network, the tasks get even more meticulous and difficult. Developers use a peculiar technique called tight coupling for proper synchronization and alignment of blocks.
Zilliqa was the first public blockchain that used sharding. Ethereum has also revealed its plans to test sharding to address latency and scalability problems. The supporters of this method are hoping for its wider adoption in the future.
Steefan George is a crypto and blockchain enthusiast, with a remarkable grasp on market and technology. Having a graduate degree in computer science and an MBA in BFSI, he is an excellent technology writer at The Coin Republic. He is passionate about getting a billion of the human population onto Web3. His principle is to write like “explaining to a 6-year old”, so that a layman can learn the potential of, and get benefitted from this revolutionary technology.
Steefan George is a crypto and blockchain enthusiast, with a remarkable grasp on market and technology. Having a graduate degree in computer science and an MBA in BFSI, he is an excellent technology writer at The Coin Republic. He is passionate about getting a billion of the human population onto Web3. His principle is to write like “explaining to a 6-year old”, so that a layman can learn the potential of, and get benefitted from this revolutionary technology.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/11/16/unearthing-the-concept-of-sharding-its-challenges-benefits/